For a long while there was only quiet on the bridge, a near silent stillness only broken by the steady electric hum of all their computer equipment and gentle 'hiss' from Mimi's body as she continued to deflate.
The two furs could only sit stone still and stare blankly out the large glass window that looked over the black, slowly digesting their most recent near death experience. Suddenly feeling exhausted, the young starship captain's hand slid weakly from his control stick and into the folf's lap, his body going limp as if he were a puppet whose strings had just been cut. Damien leaned his head back in his command chair, staring up at the ceiling as the weight over what had just happened finally settled upon him. "Well... that was fucking something." Damien finally managed with a weak voice.
"Yeah..." Mimi agreed, but not certain what to add. They both fell silent again, still processing what had just happened.
Near death experiences are a fact of life out in the black. On just one unlucky expedition, you might come across two or three instances of mortal peril, and if somehow you didn't have a near fatal accident? Your friends on other vessels would have, and certainly tell you plenty of horror stories once you got back to port. One might assume, given how common they were, that such incidents would merely fade into the background and wouldn't bother seasoned space hands like Damien and Mimi. The truth was no one was immune from such stress, no matter how experienced they were. People either learned to cope with it somehow, or they washed out. All space hands out in the black have their own way to handle it. For Mimi, she just wanted to know what had happened and why. It was the only way to soothe the knot in her stomach. So, the tigress began reconstructing what had happened. She pulled her keyboard over to her and began pounding out commands, typing with rapid fire keystrokes, nearly as fast her computer could carry out her commands.
Mimi was pulling data from the dozens of different sensors and cameras mounted on the hull of the BW69, which were constantly collecting terabytes worth of information. These data sponges were incredibly valuable, as the intelligence they collected could be sold to researchers as humanity attempted to conquer space, or even used as Mimi and Damien tried to perfect maps of their own. Just like a fisherman makes custom charts to record the best places to catch a bite, spaceship captains plot their favorite routes. Most importantly, the sensors were on a constant, vigilant lookout for danger. After all, there is nothing more dangerous to a starship than what its crew can't see, their current situation was ample proof of that!
As Mimi dug into the data, she quickly discovered that the BW69's highly sophisticated suite of sensors had been tracking and recording the doomed vessel's flight path long before Damien or Mimi had been aware of it. Without their ever alert electronic eyes and ears, Damien and Mimi never would've even known about the crashing starship heading right towards them. In fact, it had first picked up the ship on radar yesterday as the wreck slowly drifted its way through space, seemingly under no particular heading. Given the distance and slow speed of the other vessel, the BW69's threat evaluation algorithm had determined it was not yet a threat. However, sucked in by the gravity of the planet Mimi and Damien were orbiting, the unknown bogey had slowly drawn nearer, picking up speed until it appeared to be a vessel on some sort of attack run. So, the computer sounded the alarm even if on further study, Mimi was confident that the attack had merely been an unpiloted starship: its crew having either abandoned ship or been incapacitated, leaving the empty hull to drift aimlessly through space. It was only by seemingly impossible odds that the abandoned ship had gotten caught in the gravitational pull of the very planet Damien and Mimi had used, rather ironically, for protection by hiding their ship from detection. Still, the computer had been right to warn them. Without it, the space faring couple would've crashed and burned without ever knowing what had hit them.
The tigress based her conclusion largely off the ship's ice cold heat signature. Spaceship engines are enormously powerful, they have to be! Not only generate the insane amount of thrust required to take off from a planet or fly through space at hyper speed, the engines also fulfill the incredible demand for electricity a starship requires. The BW69, for instance, with a full passenger manifest and crew, consumes roughly the same amount of juice as a medium-sized city. Not only to keep up with the domestic demands of nearly a thousand souls aboard; but also the power hungry and complicated network of computers, life supporting systems, scanners, and thrusters that made the vessel function and kept its passengers alive out in the black. All this energy made functional, operating starships light up like Christmas trees on thermal cameras, especially out in the total coldness of the black.
Mimi's confidence in her conclusion grew as she continued to work her computer, slowly reconstructing and studying the flight path of the 'zombie ship'. No way would a populated, functional, spaceship be moving so slowly through space, especially if they were on any sort of attack run! She next pulled the footage of the incident, and as the tigresses rewatched the scene she'd just witnessed from multiple different angles, first in a normal speed and then again in slow motion, Mimi became more convinced by her theory. The vessel had made no apparent effort to either strike or avoid the BW69, or even avert its own doom! Rather, it followed a straight path down to the planet below picking up speed as the gravitational pull grew stronger and stronger, the zombie ship's thrusters dark and inactive as it glided past them, powered by nothing more than gravity. As it free fell towards the planet, it quickly disappeared from Mimi's sight, but not the BW69. Their ship was now picking up on the doomed ship's heat signature, its hull starting to grow hot as it fell through the planet's atmosphere. Mimi couldn't watch, but could witness the empty hull picking up speed as gravity grew stronger, and was effortlessly tracked all the way to its eventual crash site.
While Mimi worked on her computer, her mate had started to stew. Damien considered himself a man of action, he was comforted by doing more than by knowing. The how and why he had almost died didn't really concern him. Certainly not in the same way it worried Mimi! Sitting here felt like just waiting for another near collision, hostile ship attack, or some other cruel misfortune of the black to strike. This anxiety made Damien's hackles rise, as if he was a feral wolf challenging another wolf, as if pirates could be scared off by looking big and bearing your teeth!
Well... to be fair, that was basically how you scared off a pirate. Just like a common mugger, pirates were just looking for an easy score. It was just your teeth were laser guns, and you didn't make a ship look bigger by raising your hackles. Yet, as badly as he wanted to move on, he didn't push the issue and instead dutifully waited for Mimi to finish her investigation. Besides, realistically, Damien was aware he was being unreasonable. You can't really outrun danger in the black, and he knew it. What was to say taking off flying right away again wouldn't just lead them into another attack? So, he sat and allowed his mate the time she needed... Nevertheless, much like a spaceship, Damien didn't like to sit in stir. As he sat in his captain's chair and watched Mimi work her computer as he did his best to patiently wait for her to finish. He found himself having to work hard to resist the urge to reach over and grope her breasts.
